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Thursday, September 5, 2013

New from VMworld - vSphere 5.5 and vCloud Suite 5.5

Announced at VMworld 2013, VMware has released updates to both their vSphere virtualization platform with Operations Management and their vCloud Suite, designed to manage vSphere-based private clouds. Both VMware releases feature new and improved capabilities as well as new product integrations.

The updated VMware vSphere 5.5 with Operations Management offers many improvements targeted at enhancing support for business-critical applications. Offering increased customization and improved high availability functionality, vSphere 5.5 also delivers double the scalability as the previous version for levels of virtual and logical CPUs per host and maximum memory per host. vSphere 5.5 increases the maximum VMDK file size from 2 TB to 62 TB. vSphere virtual graphics processing unit (vGPU) feature has been expanded to include AMD- and Intel-based GPUs in addition to previously supported NVIDIA-based GPUs, and vGPU supports Linux operating systems with vSphere 5.5.

vSphere Flash Read Cache is also introduced with vSphere 5.5. vSphere Flash Read Cache enables the pooling of multiple Flash-based devices into a single consumable resource. Performance of virtual machines is enhanced by accelerating read-intensive workloads. vSphere Flash Read Cache is transparent to virtual machines, so no modifications are required to applications or operating systems.

As an integrated cloud infrastructure solution, the VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 update features new releases of the different components it consists of. For instance, vCloud Suite 5.5 includes new releases of VMware vCloud Networking and Security, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, VMware vCloud Director and VMware vCloud Connector.

The updated VMware vCloud Suite 5.5 also features updates to the VMware vSphere 5.5 virtualization platform. vSphere 5.5 is included within the vCloud Suite, which takes advantage of the new vSphere App HA feature, Big Data Extensions, and Flash Read Cache capabilities.

Both vSphere 5.5 and vCloud Site 5.5 upgrades will be available at no cost to customers with an existing support contract.